Saturday, 26 December 2015

Recapitulation theory refers to the idea that organism development recapitulates evolutionary history. As Ernst Haeckel's put it, "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny". Most biologists would describe Haeckel's ideas as being widely discredited. The story of Haeckel doctoring his embryo illustrations to support recapitulation theory has been widely retold.

Recapitulation theory encapsulates a rather simple truth - that development often proceeds by strapping on extra developmental phases. When this happens, ontogeny does indeed recapitulate phylogeny.

The brain makes a simple example. Brains are divided into layers, and over evolutionary time, more layers have been added.The human neocortex, for example consists of six layers. During development the neural layers are formed progressively. Migrating neurons climb up a scaffolding made of radial glial cells and bypass previous layers of neurons in the cerebral cortex, creating a new layer on top of their predecessors. This mirrors development over evolutionary time - where ancestors had fewer layers of neurons.

A simple, pure example of cultural recapitulation theory can be found in knot theory. Knots are often formed by tying knows on top of other knots. The simpler knots come first historically as well as during knot construction. A reef knot is a simple example of one knot being tied on top of another knot in order to strengthen it.

The concept of "cultural recapitulation" is often used in another way. Some say that the way that individual learning mirrors historical discovery is a case of cultural recapitulation. For example, the order in which scientific concepts are taught to children might mirror the order in which they are discovered. This is certainly recapitulation and it does involve culture, but the analogy with Ernst Haeckel's idea is weaker than with the knot example I gave. The reason is that the development involved is the development of a young animal - a memetic host rather than a memetic product. The corresponding biological analogy would be if the way in which organisms were infected with pathogens reflect the sequence in which those pathogens evolved. If is easy to imagine reasons why that might be true - for example new pathogens might be less expert at spreading to new hosts. However, this seems a bit different to classical recapitulation theory - since that does not normally involve symbiosis.

Will cultural recapitulation theory suffer the same fate as its organic counterpart? It is, perhaps too early to tell. However, maybe cultural recapitulation theory will help to revitalize recapitulation theory in the organic domain. It is a bit of a shame that recapitulation theory is so widely labelled as a dud idea. Perhaps cultural examples will help to illuminate the truth at the core of the idea.

Wednesday, 9 December 2015

Intelligent design creationism is famously opposed by evolutionists. However, few criticize the idea of intelligent design by humans. I think it is normally taken for grated that engineers have brains and so can intelligently design things.

Enter Matt Ridley. Matt characterizes intelligent design by humans as a form of creationism, and recently wrote a whole book, The Evolution of Everything, documenting its failures. Economies, religions, politics, companies and governments are all places where Matt sees this "creationism" - and its poor performance. I don't remember a single positive comment about intelligent design in the whole book.

As an antidote, I feel inclined to offer a brief summary of why intelligent design by humans is a useful tool. This didn't make it into my review - but I'm putting it here instead.

One of the tools of intelligent design is virtual prototyping. This involves constructing models in a virtual world and evaluating them there. This results in a rapid build-test cycle, low construction costs, and failures which are inexpensive.

A common construction technique among engineers is known as "rapid prototyping". This typically involves building and testing small models before constructing the final object. The virtual prototyping that takes place in the minds of intelligent agents is very similar to this "rapid prototyping" - and it has many of the same benefits associated with it.

Intelligent design is a form of evolution in which mutation and merging operations take place within a single mind. This rich environment permits a wider range of mutation and merging operations. The recombination operations include interpolation and extrapolation. This, ultimately, results in enhanced evolutionary dynamics: faster evolution and better ability to avoid getting stuck on local optima.

Intelligent design by humans does have some problems and limitations. In particular, human minds are small, have little storage. They are irrational and difficult to program. The virtual worlds they simulate are sometimes unrealistic and sometimes delusional.

However, rather than lamenting these problems, we can work on them. We can work on building bigger, better, faster minds, with access to more memory, and greater skills at performing inductive inference. Rather than relinquishing intelligent design as Ridley recommends we can improve it - using machine intelligence.

Monday, 7 December 2015

Rather to my surprise, I found quite a bit to disagree with in Matt's book. In my humble opinion, the basic problem is that Matt didn't take on the ideas described in Keeping Darwin in Mind. This leads him to regard intelligent design by human designers as a form of creationism - making it a foe to be vanquished. I don't think that this is a very well-balanced perspective.

I have long thought that the idea of incorporating intelligent design into Darwinism might cause some people to choke. So far, to the best of my knowledge, only Matt Ridley and Daniel Dennett seem to have got into problems in this area. Ridley seems to be having more problems than Dennett did.

Saturday, 5 December 2015

Most accounts of the origin of human cultural evolution focus on imitation or social learning. However there's another possibility - that the most relevant changes were in teaching ability - or inclination to teach.

The scenario I favor relating to the origin of social learning in humans involves walking. This scenario is described in my essay walking made us human. Walking is a socially-transmitted trait. Learning it promptly is extremely important for modern humans. Walking is also widely taught to offspring by their parents. This observation suggests another scenario for the early cultural evolution of humans - in which changes in teaching ability are more significant than changes in learning ability.

Teaching ability is easier to change via cultural evolution than infant learning ability is. It is probably easier to change via DNA gene evolution too. Since the trait looks as though it is probably easier to modify, there's at least a fair chance that the main difference between the early walkers and the non-walkers was that the walkers put more effort into teaching their offspring.

Teaching is not involved in all types of cultural transmission. However it is involved in transmission of walking. Acceptance of the scenario described in Walking made us human makes this "teaching first" hypothesis more likely.

Can we test the idea? The detailed history is probably lost in he mists of time. However, we can probably test the idea that teaching ability is easier for cultural and genetic evolution to produce. If so, the teaching first hypothesis becomes favored by Occam's razor - conditional on the ideas described in walking made us human.

There are still a lot of people who are totally confused about cultural evolution.
Whether due to ignorance, stupidity, bad teaching, or whatever, there are still
lots of people who just don't get it. They are still on the wrong side of the meme
paradigm shift.

We can say these people lack meme literacy.
Or we can describe them as being meme challenged.
However, sometimes, a bit more of a verbal kick in the ass seems desirable. If people are
particularly ignorant of the literature, seem to think they are entitled to spout
nonsense on the topic, and fail to update on evidence, the term 'meme denialism' may be appropriate.

I think the term should be reserved for the worst offenders. So, I'm thinking that
Steven Pinker and Massimo Pigliucci are in denial about memes, while Peter Richerson and Rob Boyd are more in the 'minor misunderstandings' zone.

Thursday, 3 December 2015

The blurb says: "Streamed live on Dec 3, 2015". You may want to fast-forwards to get to Matt's talk.

One notable moment is where Matt receives an audience question about whether his ideas are falsifiable at around 1:20:00. Note that the YouTube user involved edited and re-uploaded the video after I watched it - so you may find that the relevant section of the Q&A session has been moved or is missing.

Wednesday, 2 December 2015

It is easier to destroy than it is to create. If similar efforts expended on creation
and destruction, the destructive change is often are bigger - sometimes much bigger.
So: those who seek leverage should seriously consider destruction as an option.

I've written about the possibility of positive destruction - in my 2010 positive destruction article.

This is partly the job of promoters of skepticism and rationality. As an example, both Dawkins and Dennett have
had a go at sabotaging religious memes. I have often expressed puzzlement at this behaviour - since religious
though has been widely discredited by scientists. Scientists attacking Abrahamic religions in modern times look a bit
strange - since those religions have not been scientifically credible for a long time now. Scientifically, they are a dead issue. However, maybe, by taking advantage of the power of destruction, they are still doing some good.

I identified some other bad causes in my 2010 'bad causes' video. However, I didn't really link my conclusions up with those of the positive destruction essay. Top of my list at the time was climate change. Reviewing the topic five years later, climate change is still my number one bad cause. I don't think I have ever seen so many resources and time frittered away on such a worthless and ineffectual cause. Experts on cause prioritization seem to fairly uniformly agree that climate change is not a high priority. How then to explain the wasted billions?

One of the most obvious explanations is that fear sells. Global warming alarmists are fear-mongering. I also think that virtue signaling explains a lot about the irrational global warming hysteria. The cause offers people a chance to save the world - a well-known superstimulus to do-gooders. Trying to save the world shows that you care a lot.

Maybe global warming alarmism has enough detractors for it to no longer be low hanging fruit for critics. However it is still pretty fat - and fat targets are often attractive.

I am especially disappointed with the role that many scientists have played in the fiasco. Like Matt Ridley, I see the climate wars especially indicative of scientific funding bias. Ridley explains the problem in What the climate wars did to science. Scientists should be the first to speak up in a situation like this. A few scientists have done this = but overall, this is not what we have seen. It is a big embarrassment to those who want to proudly call themselves scientists.